The vehicle she had glimpsed before was still in the lane, a narrow, segmented, many-wheeled contraption the sides of which were slippery with illusions. Clair might have walked right into it but for the door open on its side. The space within was matte black and crammed full of people. Ray grabbed her under one arm and shoved her to the front. There was a space next to a young brown-haired boy who looked barely ten. He stared at the blood on her with wide eyes.
“Let’s go!” called Ray, slamming the door shut and falling into a space of his own.
The vehicle shifted beneath her and whined quietly through the darkness. The patches winked out. The vehicle was a Faraday cage like the safe house, safe from everyone outside. A trap for everyone inside.
“See any drones?” asked Ray, his voice carrying clearly over the electric engines.
“Clear,” said a small, thin-faced woman driving at the front of the cabin. She was dressed in black like the rest of them, with a close-shaved scalp visible under a full-vision helmet. Clair’s lenses synced automatically to a feed from the driver’s point of view, the only feed available. The vehicle was moving smoothly through suburbs covered by the eye-in-the-sky drones, weaving and curling around trees, benches, and water features. Dark colors and shapes swept down its sides like an urban waterfall, decreasing the likelihood that anyone outside would notice its passing.
“We’ll get away, don’t worry,” said the boy next to Clair. “The ATAC is camouflaged and the drones are dumb.”
Through the numbness of her senses she heard attack and must have looked confused.
“All-Terrain Active Camouflage vehicle,” he explained. Maybe he was talking out of nerves. He must have heard the gunshots. He could certainly see the blood. “Jesse’s dad designed it for us.”
“And now you’ve killed him,” said Jesse to everyone in the vehicle, breaking the silence of his emotional shutdown. “Really killed him. What happened—he got away the first time? One attempt wasn’t enough, so you had to have another crack at it?”
“He was firing at us,” said Ray. “Remember that?”
“Did you see him with your own eyes? It was dark.”
“He was the only one on the roof.”
“Well, wouldn’t you fire at someone who tried to kill you?”
Zep didn’t set any bombs, Clair wanted to say. Zep wasn’t part of this.
Her throat was so raw and tight, she struggled to breathe, let alone talk.
“We didn’t kill your father,” said Gemma to Jesse through teeth clenched against the pain. Her face was very pale, and with her good hand she pulled the silver cross from under her sweater and held it tightly. “It’s not what it looks like.”
“I was right there,” Jesse said. “Both times! I know exactly what it looks like.”
“But you’re still wrong.” Gemma leaned her head back against the ATAC’s interior bulkhead and closed her eyes. “He was a dupe.”
“Never. He would never have sold you guys out.”
“That’s not what I meant. Jesse, it wasn’t him. It was someone else inside his body. A duplicate. Dupe.”
Jesse stared at her as though she had gone completely mad.
Behind them, the safe house was a nest of converging peacekeepers. Someone had called in the gunshots. The bodies would soon be found.
Distantly, dismally, Clair wondered who would tell Zep’s parents.
And suddenly, all the emotions she had been keeping at bay came crashing in. Her parents had been attacked. She had been chased across the world. She had shot someone who might or might not have been Jesse’s dad. She was in the company of terrorists, and the only person she could rely on was a stranger whose name she didn’t even know.
Zep was gone. Because of Improvement, because of Libby, and because he had been in the wrong place at the wrong time. With Clair.
The kid left her alone as she wept.
30
THE ATAC SPED them through the night as though all the peacekeepers of Manteca were on their tail.
Route 120 had a single lane remaining for wheeled transports, leading into areas that had once been entirely rectangular fields and farm lots but now contained little other than wild things, as far as Clair knew. She had stubbornly resisted all attempts by her parents to camp in order to get her closer to them.
Everything she cared about was behind her, in the light.
The boy next to her wasn’t talking anymore. No one was talking. It was as though Gemma’s impossible declaration had pushed them into a zone beyond words. It was too insane. Too far gone ever to come back to reality.
With a sudden lurch the ATAC turned to the left onto a different road. The rough asphalt surface stabbed perfectly east, rising and falling with the contours of the land beneath.
Clair dried her eyes with the backs of her hands and wiped her hair from her face. The kid was watching her. Zep’s blood had left a sticky red mark on his arm.
“You’re Clair,” he said. “I’m Cashile.”
Her voice was hoarse. “That’s . . . that’s an unusual name.”
“It’s Zulu. My mom is from Africa.”
That reminded Clair that she had been in Cape Town a couple of hours ago, just before “q” had told her not to use d-mat. She didn’t mention that, in case it made Cashile think she didn’t have a soul, that she was a zombie who only thought she was real. She didn’t think she could handle that accusation on top of everything else.
“I’ve never seen you before,” he said, braving her silence. “You’re not one of us.”
“I guess not.”
“But you killed him.”
“Who?”
“The dupe.”
There was that word again. It might have been short for duplicate, but it also meant someone who had been tricked or fooled.
“You mean Dylan Linwood?”
“You shouldn’t call him that. It wasn’t him anymore.”
So the kid believed it, too. Maybe it was a form of mental self-defense, Clair thought. Jesse’s father wasn’t responsible for everything he’d done because it wasn’t him at all. Clair couldn’t blame them. If he was dead to them already, it would be much easier to live with his blood on their hands.
Or her hands, as the case may be. Unconsciously, she put them under her thighs and pressed down on them with all her weight.
She had shot Dylan Linwood because he had tried to shoot her. It was self-defense, not murder.
Would she see it that way in Jesse’s shoes?
“Our place in Escalon has lots of stuff,” the boy said, as though to cheer her up.
“What kind of stuff?” she asked, trying to imagine what terrorists might hide in their secret caches.
“Electrobikes, for one,” said Arabelle from behind her. “We’ll be riding the rest of the way.”
“The rest of the way where? I thought we were stopping there?”
It was Gemma’s turn to speak, slowly and painfully thanks to the gunshot wound in her shoulder. Ray had roughly dressed it during their flight from Manteca, but the bandage she pressed against the wound was already sodden with blood.
“It’s too soon to stay still. We’ll talk later. The new plan is to split up and regroup at the old Maury Rasmussen airfield. It’s not the closest, but it’s designated for hobbyists and won’t draw the kind of attention we’d get at Oakdale.”